Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Hillside House | Gray Organschi Architecture

Our clients requested a large house that would offer warm gathering spaces for extended family and friends, while also acting as a comfortably-scaled home when occupied only by a couple.The house nestles into the sensitive site, a steeply sloping woodland hillside, and breaks into wings that minimize the scale of the building and its impact in the landscape.The house’s main entrance lies along a woodland path that connects a number of small buildings on the property.By creating a grass courtyard within a natural forested landscape, we limited the demands of landscape maintenance--only the interior court is tended as a garden. Non-invasive, native plants, installed along the building’s perimeter, blend into the natural meadows and second growth forests that surround the house.The house contains a variety of program elements, including squash court, indoor pool, sauna, bedrooms and the owners’ studies, as well as a large living room, the heart of the house; the extent and interplay of interior spaces cannot be perceived from the house’s exterior and is revealed only as people move through the building.We provided both architectural and construction management services and approached the design as a series of components that could be fabricated off-site and phased in their on-site construction, affording a clockwise installation sequence to limit site time.Concrete subcontractors, framers, and finishers worked simultaneously on separate wings, consolidating the areas of construction staging and material storage.The construction “footprint” of this large project was contained within a limited area, thereby protecting the surrounding forest and avoiding the remediation that construction “creep” too often causes. We designed and built the dining, breakfast room and covered porch tables and provided interior design for the house.....more